After years of being a contractor and sometime freelancer, I am now a captive employee.
I landed a perm position with a healthcare company as a Technical Writer.
Benefits, paid vacation, etc. And, it is a remote position. I work from home.
And, for only the second time in my professional career, I am working with another technical writer.
Groundbreaking!

After Magellan, a brief pause. Then I landed a project (through an agency) for the City of Carlsbad. They needed a suite of IT security policies and procedures. Great – they wanted someone to gather best practices from other cities or other government organizations and create a set of policies for them. Wow, that was pretty cool.
That went well, then back to the hunt. The next project came in early 2015 – a topic for next post.

Recently, I worked at Magelllan GPS for about six months. I got to brush up on my FrameMaker skills, and learned to use InDesign pretty well. Also learned something about crop and bleed.
And learned something about Android, BTLE, and aspects of GPS and vehicle navigation.

Recently, one or two of my email addresses seemed be flaky, so I tried to login to my hosting provider to check settings.
I could login to my account, but cpanel – the real management interface – refused to accept my credentials.

After submitting a trouble ticket, and several rounds of testing, it developed that cpanel would respond just fine from anywhere we tried – except for my own home DSL account.
Odd…
I examined settings for my router, disabled my A-V and firewall entirely, with no improvement.
I went to a public WiFi just to test for myself – and in fact I could administer my account just fine from the free WiFi at McDonald’s.
(Yes, I know that is poor practice, and I did change my account password when I got back home. I can change the password from the Lunarpages account page, without going to cpanel.)

I then submitted a trouble ticket to my ISP.

I don’t see any response from Covad, but it mysteriously started working again.

We recently got a new desktop computer with an Intel i7 processor.
I was puzzled briefly – when observing performance of World Community Grid, I see it runs eight tasks. Then it sank in – i7 is a four-core processor.
My P4 machine runs two tasks (one core. two threads per core)
My i3 laptop runs four tasks – two cores, two threads per core.
The i7 runs eight tasks – four cores, two threads per core.
I like it.